The past few months have seen a number of new announcements
relating to curation platform Storify, which enables journalists to
pull together content from social media platforms from Twitter and
YouTube to URLs and Flickr images.

Late last year Storify joined with SoundCloud to bring its audio
recordings to the platform, along with AudioBoo recordings which
were already set up.

"We saw social media as potentially an amazing source of news
because now smartphones and social networks make it easy to publish
instantly from anywhere in the world, more and more people are
reporting what they're seeing and that's more than any news
organisation could possibly do.

"No news organisation can be everywhere where news might possibly
happen and have a reporter ready to say what's going on, but social
media does give you that.

We want to make
it as easy as possible to incorporate social media into the story
but still in the end a person decides what goes into their story,
adds the context and tells what's going onBurt Herman,
co-founder Storify

"The problem is however that
there's just too much of that. There are so many people posting
videos and updates and everything else that you can't really find
the things that matter when something important happens.

"So to solve that we turned to curation and thinking about ways to
let journalists, bloggers, or whoever wants to, find the best from
social media and turn that into a story. We want to make it as easy
as possible to incorporate social media into the story but still in
the end a person decides what goes into their story, adds the
context and tells what's going on."

Building a two-way street

"Another big thing we're thinking about is how do we not only use
social media as a source but push back out to social media and
create a version of storytelling that is inherently social on its
own.

"So that's also something we're trying to push much further. We
recently added the ability to comment, share and like individual
elements in stories, so we really want to do much more with that,
we really want to take publishing and storytelling beyond
print.

"I still think people think in a print paradigm when they're
thinking about publishing on the web and we have a chance to do so
much more."
The data opportunities of curating Storifys

I do think
there is potential, and this is something we're talking about,
where we have multiple people doing stories on the same topics,
what can we learn by putting that together?Burt Herman,
co-founder Storify

"We do look at the stories and
on our homepage we curate what we think are interesting uses of the
platform and put them together, but yes I do think there is
potential, and this is something we're talking about, where we have
multiple people doing stories on the same topics, what can we learn
by putting that together?

"We've done that kind of manually, like for example when Steve Jobs
died last year we were able to look at all the dozens and dozens of
stories people created and figure out who were the most quoted
tweets about Steve Jobs. It was pretty interesting it was like Bill
Gates, Barack Obama, the CEO of Twitter, it was kind of people you
would expect would have been the most quoted, so that was pretty
interesting.

"We need to do more with that and do that automatically so you can
search for a topic, e.g. 'Obama endorses gay marriage', we should
be able to instantly put together: this is the most quoted tweet,
this was the person who was quoted the most often, this is the most
used photo, this is the most used video. That's the type of data
we're building up behind the scenes and we have to do more to
surface that to users."

The role of social media curation in dispelling
rumour

"People are posting so much stuff on social networks a lot of
rumours spread very quickly. I think perhaps the cycle of
dispelling rumours has got a lot shorter because it's out there,
people start talking about it and you're very able to quickly fact
check this and get to the truth.

I think the
same traditions that were built up about checking your sources and
seeing if this person really is qualified to talk about what
they're talking about, that should be applied on social media
tooBurt Herman

"That curation role of elevating
certain posts, certain photos, certain videos, that is really
needed because there's so much stuff out there.

"I still think you need to apply journalistic standards to all of
this. I think the same traditions that were built up about checking
your sources and seeing if this person really is qualified to talk
about what they're talking about, that should be applied on social
media too and that's kind of early days on that as well.

"I think we need to think of how to apply journalism to social
media because now it is this amazing source, just like we've done
to other sources of information."

Storify sources

"In general our philosophy is we want to be this amazing curation
platform. We want to take any source that's a great source to use
as an input, we can do that using APIs of all these different
services, and then we want to let you publish and embed and do
whatever you want with the story that is output.

"So really we see ourselves as a central platform so definitely
enabling more sources is something we'd like to do.

"Eventually we'd want to even have an easy way people can build
sources for Storify, say a developer had some interesting way of
finding things on social media, some algorithm or some geo-location
search-type-thing - they should be able to plugin to Storify."